A triple feature

And all were good. This evening I watched Mysterious Skin (2004) by director Gregg Araki, based on the novel by Scott Heim. It takes place in 1974 and is about two boys from a small town in Kansas who were both traumatized when they were eight year's old. One lost 5 hours of his life and comes to believe he was abducted by aliens and becomes obsessed with finding out the truth. The other was abused by his baseball coach and ends up a hustler. The cast is great--from the child actors to the actors playing the teenagers that the boys grow up be: Brady Corbet and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Michelle Trachtenberg (Dawn in Buffy) plays Gordon-Levitt's best friend. I found the movie fascinating--in its treatment of the abuser, who is utterly charming and almost seems like a child himself. It's an amazing seduction of the innocent.

An Education which garnered Carey Mulligan a well-deserved Oscar nomination as a girl on the cusp of womanhood who is being pushed by her father into attending Oxford but is seduced--figuratively and literally by another charmer (Peter Sarsgaard) who is worldly and attractive and shows her possibilities outside the narrow life that seems to await her in 1961 England. Jenny is smart and is not a pushover. Very satisfying.

Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse is the bloody sequel to the French policier with Jean Reno that I watched a couple of weeks ago. Not as good as the first but still damned good.